I’ve seen a lot of fantastic articles about what Google’s beta web browser Chrome is and isn’t, will and won’t be.
My good friend Chris Messina wrote a very interesting article, which in many ways comes down to a large, influential part of the web development community being disenfranchised from Mozilla.
Doom! Of course John Lilly is playing cool on the outside, because they have long fought giants.1 Mozilla’s ability to combat goliaths, and live with fear and uncertain contribute to them being the best browser development community there is.
Although Mozilla is the best browser community, like Chris Messina, I consider myself part of the disenfranchised community, tired of the Firefox is the web mentality. But I will readily admit nobody has a better track record than Mozilla for open source consumer software development.2
As impatient consumers, particularly impatient geek consumers, we all want our pet issues addressed right NOW. One of the greatest achievements of Mozilla these last few years is worrying about the right problems at the right time. And one thing they’ve always gotten mostly right is enabling participation in all aspects of Firefox development, promotion and support.
My instincts tell me that it has slowed them down (a lot), but positions them well for the long game.
In many ways their community, their team, is like the guiding principle of the Internet, they can remove a number of members, and the team will continue to function. Firefox development is highly robust and survivable.
Are leaders like Dave Hyatt, Ben Goodger, Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, and Mike Schroepfer missed? Of course they are, but these are only a few of the many Mozilla champions.
“We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)”3
Chrome will be the browser built by Google, like Safari is the browser built by Apple. Firefox is the browser built by everyone.
Everyone that can cope in the structured, programmer-geeky rule laden Mozilla open source community. But maybe that is what is required for such a complex and important product.
What track record does Google have in open source development of consumer software? Any?
By extension what track record does Google have in supporting consumer products? Here they do have one, and it’s a poor one. Automation ultimately doesn’t cut it. Also, it’s much more fun when the software is installed, as opposed to a web service that you fix and update any time.
What community leaders has Google assembled for these heady tasks?
What open source tools do these Google leaders have in their arsenals? As great of gifts as the Netscape source code in 1998 were the open source tools to develop and collaborate on development.
Although today using Bugzilla and Bonsai (with Hg Web Viewer a poor replacement) would probably drive me nuts, those are a couple of the tools that makes development of a large, complete product by a large Mozilla community possible.
Google Code seems great for small projects, or non-consumer software projects with small teams, but I’m not convinced that Google Code is up for the challenge of a web browser.4 But I suspect it doesn’t have to be.
I don’t expect Chrome to become a leader in the browser space. I expect it to be about writing cool code, solving cool engineering problems, and pressuring Mozilla into solving the problems that Google cares about, or someone else will take Google’s code and solve them.
The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge. I expect Apple to be the first to incorporate this generously licensed code (third-party software). But Mozilla won’t be that far behind, because with the top teams collaborating on WebKit, the myth of the masses will be eroded. Sure, Mozilla’s development team may be made up mostly of volunteers, but those contributions are often picking at the surface of problems or polishing generally solved problems. The complexity of code necessitates highly skilled, highly focused, full time developers.
Chrome’s technologies will be powerful forces for the Mozilla disenfranchised. Will WebKit one day power Firefox? What other technologies or experiences will we see Firefox adopt from Chrome?
- This is probably why they haven’t been the good friends they could be to the illegitimate offspring. [↩]
- Though Ubuntu is starting to challenge Mozilla as the champion of open source consumer software. [↩]
- Mitchell Baker, “Mozilla, Firefox and Google Chrome“ [↩]
- Look to Launchpad for a modern system likely up to the challenge. [↩]
- There Is More To Research Than Google!
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3 Comments
Great post.
There are so many big companies incorporating webkit, and with Apple running the show, I suspect that it’s going to splinter just as many ways.
“the ability to merge” Classic.
Hey Lloyd, enjoyed your post. I think you make a good point, but I wouldn’t count Google out at all.
Look at the “coalition of the willing” they’ve established with OpenSocial. They *are* leading and doing a rather impressive job — given the complaints that people had about “OpenWidgets” when it first came out.
Contrast this with Facebook — who *claims* to be all about Open and I think the distinction is clear.
It is true that we’ll see how the WebKit team reacts — compared with the Mozilla community. My sense is that the WebKit team is much more mature (not in age, but in behavior) than Mozilla and will therefore be a better partner for the staid engineers at Google. We’ll see though.
In general, I think this is good for Firefox, Mozilla, Google, Apple and the Open Web. I think this validates Firefox in a big way — heck, if the two dominant browsers in the future (Firefox and Chrome) are open source, I think we’ve won a large part of the battle.
Just to say that it is a bit early to be using OpenSocial as an example of Google’s open-source wisdom. I hope it becomes that but right now it is early days.